Jeff In Japan

A very familiar site for elementary (and maybe middle) school teachers. A member of our group presented a greeting to the kids. Unfortunately, she was not an elementary school teacher so she forgot that young students have the attention spans of bored ticks. By the time she reached the 2 minute mark they had almost all completely zoned out (and they had to wait for translation!). It’s nice to see that kids will be kids no matter where you are.

Round One of pictures of kids being cute. Many more where these came from:

Monkeys, Unicycles and Stilts… Japan is certainly a fun place… (No idea how common this is – though I have seen more kids on unicycles – so I think that’s going on somewhat regularly. No other monkey sightings yet – though I do keep looking).

Here you can see the students arriving at school… No uniform in elementary school – though they do wear cute yellow hats (I am guessing so people can see them when they are crossing the street. I never did get a straight answer). Students all gather outside and do physical activities (gym-like stuff) before the day starts. Morning announcements are also made outside. I’m not sure what happens when it is raining or miserably cold – I am going to look into that (I didn’t see an auditorium – though that doesn’t mean there isn’t one per se)… As i said in previous posts, the Japanese are really concerned about their kids being woefully out of shape, so they work them every chance they get…

Ok – I know a lot of you have been waiting for the pictures of cute little elementary kids… almost there… We finally made it Yahta Kita Elementary School, and yes – the kids were cute. Yahta Kita is a pilot school for an English language program. Most Japanese kids don’t take English until junior high – but this school is doing action research, so they want to see what happens when students start learning a foreign language at a younger age. I can’t say that I was able to communicate much with the students (more on that later), but there was a lot of English written in the halls & in the classrooms – which was certainly nice to see. Here are some pictures of the school (cute kids coming soon – promise):